"Good" Comfort Women Novel? Ethics and Representational Tactics of Korean Comfort Women Novels in English

( Jeongyun Ko ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2016 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.24 No.1

The paper discusses continuing efforts to represent Korean comfort women by various English novel writers of different ethnic and national backgrounds. Expanding the question raised by Laura Hyun Yi Kang in “Conjuring ‘Comfort Women,’” where she notes how comfort women novels in English are governed by “techniques” and “protocols” to create “a good novel in English” as much as they aim to realize justice, I engage with the discussion of ethics and representation of comfort women and then consider literary strategies found in creating comfort women narratives in English. Reading two recently published comfort women novels, Kalliope Lee’s Sunday Girl and Mark Sampson’s Sad Peninsula, the paper highlights how the distance, or the lack of it, between the narrator/witness and comfort women characters, affects the narrativization of comfort women’s histories. Questioning the validity or the effects of the so-called vicarious experience of pain through reading, the paper discusses the intended distance-erasing strategy revealed in Lee’s Sunday Girl, where the Korean American female narrators/witnesses are connected to comfort women through the shared experience of sexual violation. It also examines Mark Sampson’s Sad Peninsula which highlights distance between the white male narrator/witness and a Korean comfort woman and questions the representational desire of the writing subject. In the process, the paper contemplates how the ethics of representation and writerly desire to create good stories can be balanced and also how the power to move people to change the reality of the present and the future can ever be realized in written pages.

American Multiculturalism and Postracial Fantasy in Janice K Lee"s The Expatriates

Jeongyun Ko(고정윤) 새한영어영문학회 2016 새한영어영문학회 학술발표회 논문집 Vol.2016 No.10

Moving Between India and America : Lavanya Sankaran’s Return Stories in The Red Carpet

Ko, Jeongyun 한국중앙영어영문학회 2019 영어영문학연구 Vol.61 No.3

The paper attempts a close reading of two short stories “Alphabet Soup” and “Apple Pie One by Two” from Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet. It examines the short stories as narratives that successfully represent various impacts of current century’s transnational movements on heterogenous diasporic Indians. By focusing on the Indian city of Bangalore in the depicted transnational movements, Sankaran succeeds in presenting new light on continuously changing natures of transnational movements of the new century. The Bangalore city, known as India’ silicon valley, experienced and explored by returnees from America defies any easy description. For Indian Americans, the return visit to Bangalore forces a complete reconstruction of Asian American identity. To high-skilled professional migrants, Bangalore provides unprecedented chances, allowing them to have transnational connections while staying in India. However, the characters’ individual choices and preferences are also governed by national policies of both India and America and also by the flow of global capitalism. Sankaran succeeds in presenting the very heterogeneous nature of such transnational movements between America and India and carefully represents how each character’s identity is constantly re-negotiated in the process.

Gender, Class, and Postracial American World of Janice Y. K. Lee’s The Expatriates

( Jeongyun Ko ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2018 현대영미소설 Vol.25 No.2

Despite the exposed hegemony of gender and class that can be detected in the recently published novel The Expatriates written by a Korean American writer Janice Lee, the text lacks serious engagement with the issue of race in general. The paper tries to analyze this absence of racial consciousness in the text in relation to the recent emergence of the so-called Asian American postracial literature. Post-racial Asian American literature can be understood and read in multiple ways. When an Asian American writer attempts to deal with a universal theme that is not confined to the exclusive experience of Asian Americans, so post-racial in a sense, what happens intriguingly in the text is not a total removal of the discursive system of race, gender, and class. Rather, as many critics discussing the potential of post-racial Asian American literature, such literature innately reveals and highlights the perpetuation of the system despite the seeming absence. Reading The Expatriates as a text that deals with the theme of motherhood in relation to gender and class issues involved in Americans' border-crossings to Asia, the paper analyzes how the overlooked issue of race in the text in the end plays an important role in highlighting the fantasy of the postracial world.

Dialogic Voices in The Woman Warrior

Ko, Jeongyun 한국중앙영어영문학회 2019 영어영문학연구 Vol.61 No.1

This paper revisits Maxine Hong Kingston’s ground breaking novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory on dialogic discourses, the paper examines multiple voiced discourses of The Woman Warrior that reveal intricate conflicts embedded in various types of oppressions the Chinese American female narrator faces in America. Through a close reading of the text, the paper attempts to discover multiple voices hidden in The Woman Warrior and examine how these voices prevent the reader from settling in absolute truths from the text. Kingston allows the text to have these heterogenous dialogic voices by first challenging and deconstructing any authoritative discourses that demand unconditional allegiance from listeners. Instead of these authoritative narratives, Kingston makes the narrator create playfully multiple and even conflicting voices that allow the room for heteroglossia to emerge. Examples of these carefully crafted dialogic voices are examined as Kingston’s narrative strategy to create heteroglossic world in The Woman Warrior. In the process, the paper argues that Kingston’s strategy of using dialogic voices enabled her to effectively represent heterogeneous nature of Chinese American women’s lives in the 1970s.

Globalized World of Desires : Transnational Representations and Stereotypes in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

Ko, Jeongyun 한국중앙영어영문학회 2012 영어영문학연구 Vol.54 No.3

“Globalized World of Desires” analyzes My Year of Meats, reading it as a text that divulges complicated desires embedded in transnational representations of our globalized world. Applying Rey Chow’s interpretation on the function of stereotypes as unavoidable elements in any act of representations, this paper considers main characters’ and the writer Ozeki’s desires to represent national and transnational spaces as desires to stereotype. Chow asserts that an act of stereotyping should be understood as a political tactic and power to intervene and control. And I argue that Chow’s analysis of stereotypes as qualities intrinsic in every attempt to represent allows a reading of My Year of Meats as a text that demonstrates intriguing transnational contests for the right to stereotype. By examining the characters’ and Ozeki’s convoluted desires to represent and thus to control, the paper highlights complex mechanism of cross-cultural and transnational representations and stereotypes in the age of massive global commerce. In the process, the ideology of American liberal multiculturalism displayed through the main protagonist Jane and Ozeki becomes under scrutiny.

Introducing Asian Women’s Voices into the U.S.: Changes in Chinese and Japanese Women’s Anthologies in English Translation

( Jeongyun Ko ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2018 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.26 No.1

The paper engages with several sets of questions regarding the representation of Asian women in the U.S. Recognizing that images of monolithically rendered Asian women are quite prevalent in both cultural and academic sites of the U.S., I turn to possible alternative stories of Asian women in translation as potential tools that disrupt the enduring stereotypes of Asian women. Briefly reviewing Chinese and Japanese women’s literature in English anthologies published in the past three decades or so, the paper considers how the marker, Asian women as a term referring to Asian women located in Asia has been translated and consumed in the U.S. site. Then, the paper attempts a closer reading of two specific anthologies, Red is Not the Only Color, a collection of stories by Chinese female writers and Inside and Other Short Fiction by Japanese women writers. Without overlooking the problem involved in the term “alternative” or “new” used to introduce divergent voices of heterogeneous Asian women, the paper calls the attention to the importance of active critical interventions on the part of various scholars and translators involved in the field of cross cultural representation of Asia.

Circling Through Diasporas and Asia: Narratives of Transnational Connectivities

Ko, Jeongyun 한국중앙영어영문학회 2015 영어영문학연구 Vol.57 No.1

This paper ponders relations between Asia and its diasporas other than those of popular binary patterns of past Asia and present diasporas. Contemplating transnational connectivities newly enabled in the age of globalization, the paper examines the possibilities of diasporic Asians and Asian Americans’ horizontal and circular encounters, in both temporal and spatial senses, not with Asia as the supposed origin/past, but with constantly changing present Asia. Karen Tei Yamashita’s Circle K Cycles is analyzed as a text that presents such possibilities of diasporic/Asian/American writers’ imaginative encounters with Asia as its stories circle through ever changing heterogeneous locations of diasporic/Asian Americas and Asia. The economic inequalities and discrimination Japanese Brazilian dekasegi workers experience in Japan are juxtaposed with Japanese American Yamashita’s relatively comfortable and voluntary transnational experience. In the process, Yamshita succeeds in presenting heterogeneous transnational movements of different diasporic groups in the age of globalization. While some national group’s movements are not so much voluntary as the movements are governed by global economics, political decisions of nation-states, and the ideology of race, others can freely choose the transnational movements as a way of exploring new world. Despite the inequality and different experiences, the world created in Circle K Cycles presents intriguing flows and mixtures of heterogenous individuals and their cultures, allowing readers to experience imaginary multiple border crossings across Brazil, America, and Japan.

현대 미국의 동서양 이분법에 관한 고찰

고정윤 ( Jeongyun Ko ) 아시아문화학술원 2018 인문사회 21 Vol.9 No.2

본 연구는 수세기 동안 지속된 오리엔탈리즘이 현대 미국의 다양한 공간에서 드러나고 있는 방식을 고찰하는 것을 목표로 한다. 논문은 아시아를 이해하고 상상하는 방식으로서의 미국적 오리 엔탈리즘이 어떻게 지속되고 있는지를 검토한다. 이러한 미국의 동서양 이분법은 논문에서 두 가지 유형으로 구분되어 논의된다. 첫 번째는 미국인들의 대중적인 사고 속에 뿌리 깊이 자리 잡은 잘 알려진 형태의 오리엔탈리즘이다. 두 번째는 서구의 식민/후기 식민 지배를 비판하는 과정에서 생성되는 미국학계의 오리엔탈리즘과의 공모이다. 결론으로 논문은 더 풍부해지고 미국에서 접근이 가능해진 다양한 아시아의 문화 텍스트들이 이러한 지속적인 이분법을 무너트리는데 있어서 하나의 효과적인 도구가 될 수 있음을 주장한다. The paper aims to reflect upon the ways that age-old dichotomy of the West and East unfolds in diverse sites of comtemporary America. It examines how American Orientalism as a mode of understanding and imagining Asia has been maintained. In the paper, the binary of the West and Asia is considered in two different ways. The first mode is a well-known, patent form of Orientalism that is deeply rooted in popular imagination of Americans. The second mode is revealed in US academics’ complicity in Orientalism, ironically found in their attempts to critique the West’s colonial and postcolonial dominance. In conclusion, the paper suggests heterogeneous cultural texts of Asia, which became more abundant and accessible in the US, as a potential tool in rupturing the persistent binary.

아시아계 미국문학 칙릿 소설로서의 『스물일곱, 내 청춘이 수상하다』

고정윤 ( Jeongyun Ko ) 사단법인 아시아문화학술원 2019 인문사회 21 Vol.10 No.2

본 연구는 캐롤라인 황의 『스물일곱, 내 청춘이 수상하다』를 아시아계 미국문학으로서의 칙릿 소설로 분석한다. 특히 아시아계 미국인 여성의 사회적 이슈들을 재현하는데 있어 칙릿 소설 장르의 효과성을 검토하기 위하여, 논문은 먼저 기존의 칙릿 소설들이 여성 문제를 다루는데 있어서 보여준 가능성을 논의한 학계의 토론들을 살펴본다. 논문은 『스물일곱, 내 청춘이 수상하다』가 한국계 미국인 여주인공의 이야기를 통해, 아시아계 미국인 여성이 미국사회에서 직면하는 문제를 다채롭게 재현함으로서, 백인 여성의 문제에 집중한 기존의 미국 칙릿소설 장르의 가능성을 확장하고 있음을 살펴본다. 결론적으로, 본 논문은 캐롤라인 황이 인기장르인 칙릿 소설의 틀을 활용하여 기존의 아시아계 미국문학 독자층을 넘어서서 성공적으로 더 많은 독자층에 다가설 뿐 만 아니라 더 나아가, 미국 주류 독자들을 만족시키기 위하여 아시아계 미국인에게 중요한 사회 정치적 이슈를 희생시키지 않고 작품의 전면에 내세우고 있음을 검토한다. This study aims to examine Caroline Hwang’s In Full Bloom as an Asian American Chick-lit novel. To consider the effects of Chick-lit genre in conveying Asian American women’s issues, the paper first examines existing scholarly discussion on Chick-lit novels’ potential in highlighting feminist agendas. Then, it considers how Hwang’s Korean American heroine expands the possibility of the Chick-lit genre by tackling Asian American women’s social issues. The paper concludes that by employing popular genre of Chick-lit, Caroline Hwang succeeds in reaching for broader readers beyond typical Asian American literature readers without risking serious questions related to Asian American women’s lives.